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Some Charles Dickens On Christmas Morning
Dec. 25th, 2011 09:58 amMaureen Dowd has left us a nice Christmas present in our New York Times this morning, some colorful biographical notes on Charles Dickens.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Dec. 25th, 2011
Some Charles Dickens On Christmas Morning
Dec. 25th, 2011 09:58 amMaureen Dowd has left us a nice Christmas present in our New York Times this morning, some colorful biographical notes on Charles Dickens.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Monk's News Reel
Dec. 25th, 2011 03:35 pm[A]t the end of each of the last seven years, searches for 'Christmas' briefly peak higher than searches for the word 'porn.' We're approaching that time of year, and fascinatingly, based on the trends here, I'd have to say that Christmas ain't gonna make it in 2011. Porn will reign all the live long year.
-- Alexis Madrigal
The suicide rate in Greece has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country's economic crisis.
Painful austerity measures and a seemingly endless economic drama is exacting a deadly toll on the nation. Statistics released by the Greek ministry of health show a 40% rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared to the same period in 2010.
-- LJ/Guardian
Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North’s official news media on Monday. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.
-- David E. Sanger at The New York Times
Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."
-- Jeb Bush at The Wall Street Journal
(CNN) - Christians are by far the largest religious group on the planet, and the religion has gone truly global over the past century, according to a new report out Monday, which finds some of the world's biggest Christian communities in surprising places.
-- Richard Allen Greene at CNN
Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”...
While the anger over the recent sex abuse allegations would suggest that the deviant label will remain for pedophilia, the reality remains that powerful advocates with access to university presses will continue their semantic and ideological campaign to define down this form of deviance.
-- Anne Hendershott at PublicDiscourse.com
In the final analysis, what emerges from the parsing of unbeautiful statistics and studies is a Darwinian description of beauty: Beauty rewards the tall, the thin, and the good-looking and penalizes the rest. One of Hamermesh's most striking figures is an actual dollar amount of how much more, on average, beautiful people earn than nonbeautiful ones during the course of their lifetimes—$230,000. Hakim gathers an avalanche of research on the "beauty premium," the amount of money that "attractive" people (she dislikes the word beauty, which she believes is constructed anyway) make above their plain peers, as evidence for one of the main themes of her book, which is that dollar for dollar, men earn more for their looks than women do. She quotes a 1991 survey reportedly showing that attractive men make 14 percent more than their unattractive male colleagues, whereas attractive women earn a mere 3 percent more than theirs. (A recent study featured in The New York Times argues that makeup makes a woman appear more likeable, competent, and trustworthy—or at least makes others like her—although the study was financed by Procter & Gamble.)...
Whatever their viewpoint, all these books echo second-wave feminism's conviction that beauty is something men do to women. Do scholars really want to devote themselves to reducing beauty to a stick to beat people with? Beauty is anarchic, a force of nature, a gift. Like love, it is mysterious, not least of all because it can change your life. On reality-television shows where contestants were given plastic surgery, they looked extremely happy when they came on set post-op to show their friends and family the New Them. (Surveys back up women's satisfaction after those procedures.)
I count myself as a feminist, not a plastic-surgery junkie. And yet it seems to me that to reduce the pursuit of beauty to something brainwashed or oppressed women try for is as insulting as insisting senselessly that it is empowering. If there is no place for beauty in our culture, I'm not sure I want to live in it.
--- Rachel Shteir at The Chronicle Review
One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.
This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the first half of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.
-- David Goldman at FrontPageMag.com
(CNN) -- On Tuesday, a federal advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, recommended that university scientists who have submitted articles on how to modify a flu virus to two very prestigious journals delete critical information from them before publishing. The papers describe how to alter bird-flu virus to be more infectious and potentially nastier.
-- Arthur Caplan at CNN
“How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” Bozell wondered. “Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does.”
-- Brent Bozell
-- Alexis Madrigal
The suicide rate in Greece has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country's economic crisis.
Painful austerity measures and a seemingly endless economic drama is exacting a deadly toll on the nation. Statistics released by the Greek ministry of health show a 40% rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared to the same period in 2010.
-- LJ/Guardian
Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North’s official news media on Monday. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.
-- David E. Sanger at The New York Times
Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."
-- Jeb Bush at The Wall Street Journal
(CNN) - Christians are by far the largest religious group on the planet, and the religion has gone truly global over the past century, according to a new report out Monday, which finds some of the world's biggest Christian communities in surprising places.
-- Richard Allen Greene at CNN
Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”...
While the anger over the recent sex abuse allegations would suggest that the deviant label will remain for pedophilia, the reality remains that powerful advocates with access to university presses will continue their semantic and ideological campaign to define down this form of deviance.
-- Anne Hendershott at PublicDiscourse.com
In the final analysis, what emerges from the parsing of unbeautiful statistics and studies is a Darwinian description of beauty: Beauty rewards the tall, the thin, and the good-looking and penalizes the rest. One of Hamermesh's most striking figures is an actual dollar amount of how much more, on average, beautiful people earn than nonbeautiful ones during the course of their lifetimes—$230,000. Hakim gathers an avalanche of research on the "beauty premium," the amount of money that "attractive" people (she dislikes the word beauty, which she believes is constructed anyway) make above their plain peers, as evidence for one of the main themes of her book, which is that dollar for dollar, men earn more for their looks than women do. She quotes a 1991 survey reportedly showing that attractive men make 14 percent more than their unattractive male colleagues, whereas attractive women earn a mere 3 percent more than theirs. (A recent study featured in The New York Times argues that makeup makes a woman appear more likeable, competent, and trustworthy—or at least makes others like her—although the study was financed by Procter & Gamble.)...
Whatever their viewpoint, all these books echo second-wave feminism's conviction that beauty is something men do to women. Do scholars really want to devote themselves to reducing beauty to a stick to beat people with? Beauty is anarchic, a force of nature, a gift. Like love, it is mysterious, not least of all because it can change your life. On reality-television shows where contestants were given plastic surgery, they looked extremely happy when they came on set post-op to show their friends and family the New Them. (Surveys back up women's satisfaction after those procedures.)
I count myself as a feminist, not a plastic-surgery junkie. And yet it seems to me that to reduce the pursuit of beauty to something brainwashed or oppressed women try for is as insulting as insisting senselessly that it is empowering. If there is no place for beauty in our culture, I'm not sure I want to live in it.
--- Rachel Shteir at The Chronicle Review
One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.
This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the first half of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.
-- David Goldman at FrontPageMag.com
(CNN) -- On Tuesday, a federal advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, recommended that university scientists who have submitted articles on how to modify a flu virus to two very prestigious journals delete critical information from them before publishing. The papers describe how to alter bird-flu virus to be more infectious and potentially nastier.
-- Arthur Caplan at CNN
“How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” Bozell wondered. “Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does.”
-- Brent Bozell
Monk's News Reel
Dec. 25th, 2011 03:35 pm[A]t the end of each of the last seven years, searches for 'Christmas' briefly peak higher than searches for the word 'porn.' We're approaching that time of year, and fascinatingly, based on the trends here, I'd have to say that Christmas ain't gonna make it in 2011. Porn will reign all the live long year.
-- Alexis Madrigal
The suicide rate in Greece has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country's economic crisis.
Painful austerity measures and a seemingly endless economic drama is exacting a deadly toll on the nation. Statistics released by the Greek ministry of health show a 40% rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared to the same period in 2010.
-- LJ/Guardian
Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North’s official news media on Monday. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.
-- David E. Sanger at The New York Times
Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."
-- Jeb Bush at The Wall Street Journal
(CNN) - Christians are by far the largest religious group on the planet, and the religion has gone truly global over the past century, according to a new report out Monday, which finds some of the world's biggest Christian communities in surprising places.
-- Richard Allen Greene at CNN
Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”...
While the anger over the recent sex abuse allegations would suggest that the deviant label will remain for pedophilia, the reality remains that powerful advocates with access to university presses will continue their semantic and ideological campaign to define down this form of deviance.
-- Anne Hendershott at PublicDiscourse.com
In the final analysis, what emerges from the parsing of unbeautiful statistics and studies is a Darwinian description of beauty: Beauty rewards the tall, the thin, and the good-looking and penalizes the rest. One of Hamermesh's most striking figures is an actual dollar amount of how much more, on average, beautiful people earn than nonbeautiful ones during the course of their lifetimes—$230,000. Hakim gathers an avalanche of research on the "beauty premium," the amount of money that "attractive" people (she dislikes the word beauty, which she believes is constructed anyway) make above their plain peers, as evidence for one of the main themes of her book, which is that dollar for dollar, men earn more for their looks than women do. She quotes a 1991 survey reportedly showing that attractive men make 14 percent more than their unattractive male colleagues, whereas attractive women earn a mere 3 percent more than theirs. (A recent study featured in The New York Times argues that makeup makes a woman appear more likeable, competent, and trustworthy—or at least makes others like her—although the study was financed by Procter & Gamble.)...
Whatever their viewpoint, all these books echo second-wave feminism's conviction that beauty is something men do to women. Do scholars really want to devote themselves to reducing beauty to a stick to beat people with? Beauty is anarchic, a force of nature, a gift. Like love, it is mysterious, not least of all because it can change your life. On reality-television shows where contestants were given plastic surgery, they looked extremely happy when they came on set post-op to show their friends and family the New Them. (Surveys back up women's satisfaction after those procedures.)
I count myself as a feminist, not a plastic-surgery junkie. And yet it seems to me that to reduce the pursuit of beauty to something brainwashed or oppressed women try for is as insulting as insisting senselessly that it is empowering. If there is no place for beauty in our culture, I'm not sure I want to live in it.
--- Rachel Shteir at The Chronicle Review
One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.
This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the first half of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.
-- David Goldman at FrontPageMag.com
(CNN) -- On Tuesday, a federal advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, recommended that university scientists who have submitted articles on how to modify a flu virus to two very prestigious journals delete critical information from them before publishing. The papers describe how to alter bird-flu virus to be more infectious and potentially nastier.
-- Arthur Caplan at CNN
“How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” Bozell wondered. “Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does.”
-- Brent Bozell
-- Alexis Madrigal
The suicide rate in Greece has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country's economic crisis.
Painful austerity measures and a seemingly endless economic drama is exacting a deadly toll on the nation. Statistics released by the Greek ministry of health show a 40% rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared to the same period in 2010.
-- LJ/Guardian
Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North’s official news media on Monday. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.
-- David E. Sanger at The New York Times
Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."
-- Jeb Bush at The Wall Street Journal
(CNN) - Christians are by far the largest religious group on the planet, and the religion has gone truly global over the past century, according to a new report out Monday, which finds some of the world's biggest Christian communities in surprising places.
-- Richard Allen Greene at CNN
Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”...
While the anger over the recent sex abuse allegations would suggest that the deviant label will remain for pedophilia, the reality remains that powerful advocates with access to university presses will continue their semantic and ideological campaign to define down this form of deviance.
-- Anne Hendershott at PublicDiscourse.com
In the final analysis, what emerges from the parsing of unbeautiful statistics and studies is a Darwinian description of beauty: Beauty rewards the tall, the thin, and the good-looking and penalizes the rest. One of Hamermesh's most striking figures is an actual dollar amount of how much more, on average, beautiful people earn than nonbeautiful ones during the course of their lifetimes—$230,000. Hakim gathers an avalanche of research on the "beauty premium," the amount of money that "attractive" people (she dislikes the word beauty, which she believes is constructed anyway) make above their plain peers, as evidence for one of the main themes of her book, which is that dollar for dollar, men earn more for their looks than women do. She quotes a 1991 survey reportedly showing that attractive men make 14 percent more than their unattractive male colleagues, whereas attractive women earn a mere 3 percent more than theirs. (A recent study featured in The New York Times argues that makeup makes a woman appear more likeable, competent, and trustworthy—or at least makes others like her—although the study was financed by Procter & Gamble.)...
Whatever their viewpoint, all these books echo second-wave feminism's conviction that beauty is something men do to women. Do scholars really want to devote themselves to reducing beauty to a stick to beat people with? Beauty is anarchic, a force of nature, a gift. Like love, it is mysterious, not least of all because it can change your life. On reality-television shows where contestants were given plastic surgery, they looked extremely happy when they came on set post-op to show their friends and family the New Them. (Surveys back up women's satisfaction after those procedures.)
I count myself as a feminist, not a plastic-surgery junkie. And yet it seems to me that to reduce the pursuit of beauty to something brainwashed or oppressed women try for is as insulting as insisting senselessly that it is empowering. If there is no place for beauty in our culture, I'm not sure I want to live in it.
--- Rachel Shteir at The Chronicle Review
One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.
This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the first half of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.
-- David Goldman at FrontPageMag.com
(CNN) -- On Tuesday, a federal advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, recommended that university scientists who have submitted articles on how to modify a flu virus to two very prestigious journals delete critical information from them before publishing. The papers describe how to alter bird-flu virus to be more infectious and potentially nastier.
-- Arthur Caplan at CNN
“How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” Bozell wondered. “Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does.”
-- Brent Bozell
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time …”
-- Sylvia Plath Journals, 1950
-- Sylvia Plath Journals, 1950
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time …”
-- Sylvia Plath Journals, 1950
-- Sylvia Plath Journals, 1950
The Christmas Story
Dec. 25th, 2011 10:19 pmSully was good enough to lead us to Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas Eve homily, and although this is high-octane Christianity, I find it incredibly sweet and wish to keep it and share it with anyone who might be interested, while it is still Christmas. It is the way I like to think about Christianity, even if I am not much of a believer in supernatural realities. I am something of a romantic and a dreamer.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
The Christmas Story
Dec. 25th, 2011 10:19 pmSully was good enough to lead us to Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas Eve homily, and although this is high-octane Christianity, I find it incredibly sweet and wish to keep it and share it with anyone who might be interested, while it is still Christmas. It is the way I like to think about Christianity, even if I am not much of a believer in supernatural realities. I am something of a romantic and a dreamer.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )